Despite surging jobs numbers, Sean Hannity claims America lost three million jobs in January

Despite surging jobs numbers, Sean Hannity claims America lost three million jobs in January

still image of Sean Hannity
Audio file

Citation From the February 5, 2024, edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Sean Hannity Show

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): Everyone getting all orgasmic over the deal that, you know, x number of jobs are created. Here's the problem with this. 60% of American parents are using their retirement savings to pay their adult children's bills. We still have 62% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. The high cost of food and the higher cost of pretty much everything we buy has not changed in spite of "the stock market and Bureau of Labor Statistics spin" that they put out.

Zero Hedge did a really good analysis of this, and I thought it was a great analysis of the great jobs numbers that everyone was praising on Friday, it's almost entirely due to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest choice of seasonal adjustments, which have gone from merely laughable to a full on clown show.

In other words, if you have a comparison between the revised Bureau of Labor Statistic payroll number and the ADP payroll number, it shows the Biden administration numbers are now clearly rising even as the impartial ADP, which directly logs employment numbers at the company level, is actually far more accurate, and it shows an accelerating slowdown. So I'm not buying any of this giddiness that they're trying to, you know, force on the American people, never mind the fact that in terms of real spending and real dollars, Americans, you know, were $11,000 annually richer under Donald Trump.

Anyway, ADP pointed out that the unadjusted number was actually down 2.635 million, a three million job decline, and the average hourly wages and earnings, that spiked from 4.1 to 4.5%, the highest since last last September, but the problem is the hourly earnings number rose only because the BLS decided to sharply slash the number of estimated hours that everyone was working from 34.3 to just 34.1, may not sound like a lot until one realizes that the last time the work week was this low was when the economy was shut down during COVID. So why would anybody be electing this guy?